twangypearl the elastic girl

Mr Blue Sky

Most improbably, I have finished my cone project in plenty of time for hand-off this evening, an event which will require me to walk for 10 mins, take a bus, walk for another 20mins, (or MAYBE, I'll just take a taxi, though that kind of thing makes me as nervous as W4I. Apparently I believe a taxi is the thin end of the wedge that will inevitably lead to a online gambling addiction, thousands of euros of debt and end with my living under a bridge) knock on a door I have never seen before, go: Martin? in hopeful tones if a man answers or: Hi! Is Martin there? if a woman answers. Then I will dump deliver the Big Black Portfolio and SKIP SKIP SKIP away feeling OH-SO-LIGHT and who even cares what it looks like anymore? I've got rid, as they say on Corrie.

I've been having a bit of a time of it. Do you remember this, kindly readers?

This is what it's been like, for months, but with extra juggling and exhaustion-induced despair/irrational thoughts. I am so burned out I am actually a Walkers crisp, and those illustrations still need to be done by end of month. (Those fecking things - it's like trying to outrun your own shadow. It's getting mystical, as this point.) While this is just feasible, I am reminded of that saying about people who have been made partner in a law practice: It's like winning a pie-eating contest. And your prize is more pie.

Next week, my students have exams, an event that involves a vast amount of forms called (things like) Learner's Assessment F11-R456. On the other hand, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Only! 6! weeks! to! the! end! of term! Holiers needed URGENTLY.

Other things I have noticed of late:

• The JB has been away for the last week, at a conference. In his absence I have been shocked to discover my breakfast dishes are still there, lying around in grey water, when I get home after school. Proof he does do dishes. Huh! I thought I did Everything Around Here. That's the thing about housework, isn't it? It's only noticed if it's not done.
  
  
• Also. Yes. What was the other thing.
  
  
• Ah. Our floor in The Hotel Tallafornia now hosts a weekly vist from Slimming World. A whole world of slimming - imagine! Continents of svelteness and seas of self-confidence! I am reassured by its logo every morning: Slimming World: Because [I am] amazing. Huh, ta, Slimming World.
  
  
• I think, anyway.
  
  
• It seems that the Authority may be sorting something out with regard to India opening - soon-ish. Also hopeful signs float over Florida. Too tired to be excited, but I presume I am, really.
  
  
• Alrighty then. I am going to go and do the drop-off, I reckon.

Be well, friends.

xx

T

 

 

 

first world problems

I'm in that dopey, la-la, mood, where I keep half-doing things and getting distracted and half-doing something else. I have loads to do, I am sure of it. But you know when you don't quite know what to do first, and you think: I know, I'll write a post? And then I'll feel better, having given myself the illusion that I have achieved something.

• My laptop gave up the ghost last week. When you try to turn it on, it starts patting its pockets and saying: Oh, ssshit. Now, where did I put my hard drive? Hang on, I am sure it's here somewhere. It must be... oh, how embarrassing, maybe it's... no...
  Then it makes some unreasonably loud electronic pings at you, while presumably it searches around its flat frantically, throwing stuff around, looking for its vital bits.
  Nothing, according to the young man in the laptop clinic, can be saved from it. It is officially banjaxed. I am trying to take this in cavalier fashion. After all, I did back up sometimes and what the hell, it's just a sort of forced de-clutter of all the detritus I collected over the years. Onward, and less encumbered by crappy freeware programmes!

• Likewise banjaxed is my car. Battery is defunct.

• Teaching is making me feel a bit lonely. I want to be on the other side of the desk, where you have friends to complain to - it's so much funner, more collegial. Boo. But, oh, fellow teachers! Oh! It's all (almost) worth it for that wondrous moment of squeeeee! freedom when you escape from the classroom until the next time! OH THAT BIT IS MARVELLOUS, isn't it?

• PKitty, though, now, the kitty, has been doing her best to cheer me up with little gifts. True, had I been in a position to choose, I might have preferred a pink Moleskine sketchbook, or perhaps some lavendar soap rather than - say - a half-dead fieldmouse, but, you know how it is, it's the thought that counts. So far I have not witnessed the delivery of the afore-mentioned rodents into the kitchen for bragging purposes but the JB has reported that she even went to the trouble of putting on a mini Christians and Lions type show for his entertainment. Mousey, mousey, I release you! Ha! No, I don't! Yes, I do! NO, don't be silly, OF COURSE I DON'T! CRUNCH.
  And so on. Anything to offer on this, anyone? I understand Nature is all red and rude, and so forth, but I feel sorry for the mice. She's so mean.

Here she is, the murderer herself:

I fear she is about that fat. She might have lost a few ounces recently. My human friend R, to the cat, when she came to visit:
Ooh, you're enoooormous!
BODY FASCISM, that is.

Anyway. How goes the mood with you?
T

 

learning

IS IT JUST ME, I WONDER

A couple of weekends ago:

TWANGY, seeing an opportunity to bond with DAZZLE, (the three-year-old niece) while the rest of the family are engaged in an interminable game of Capitalist Market Forces Monopoly, extends 'claws' and roars, experimentally:
Rrrrrar! I'm a tiger.

DAZZLE smiles indulgently.

TWANGY: What are you?

DAZZLE: I'm a people.

How deflating.

---

Further conversation, this time with a student:
ALEX(not real name!): So, in relation to.. I just want to understand. My head is wrecked here. When you copy a file, where is that?
TWANGY: Emmm. Well. What? It goes on to the clipboard.
ALEX :  But.. where is the clipboard?
TWANGY (not feeling terribly patient at this point): It's just out there, Alex. In virtual space.
In your computer's RAM or something, Alex.
ALEX: But. It's  just these notes don't talk about the clipboard. I think these notes are a bit...
TWANGY considers a rapid exit out of the window.

Speaking of the Hotel Tallafornia, and the "learning" that takes place therein with my unemployed would-be designers, it should come as no surprise that we are dealing, per usual, with the Usual Suspects. The same ould cast of characters. There's the one with the attitude, there are the moaners, there are the gigglers, there are those afflicted with shyness, those encumbered with laziness. The sickly, the smart, the motivated, the dense. 'Twas ever thus, was it not, teachers, educators, librarians? The moaners were moaning at me last week, and I had this lightbulb revelation: these people (whispered The Little Voice of Obviousness) are not my friends. In this relationship, here,  it's my job to hold the thing together, and be respected.

This is stunningly self-evident, I do realise. Maybe it's the chronic informality of the Irish, but up to now, I have always assumed that friendliness, a general enthusiasm for the subject, respect for their efforts and a pretence at a flat hierarchy would see me through this teaching gig. Now, I realise that to act as if there is no difference between us, except that I just happen to be standing at the other side of the table is just not going to work. After all, I am in charge of time-keeping, and there is money involved in that, this being a state-sponsored training course. So, how to play it? Shall I become (gets carefully into American character) a 'hardass'? Would this be better for all concerned? Thoughts on this welcome. What is your style?

I've told you about the hotel as venue of higher education in this brave new world, haven't I?
We are in the one heated room on the fifth floor of a mostly empty office block, (itself mysteriously part of the hotel), surrounded by empty offices like this:



It's so fantastically creepy, like some weird art installation. The other morning, the previously abandoned and chilly reception area had leaflets scattered around and a big poster over it:
THE PENTECOSTALS
Presumably they checked-in-but-can-never-leave the night before? Yet no sign of them since.
And then, odder yet, and, to use  The Young People's favourite word, 'totally random':


Bridge tables sprang up overnight. Bridge tables. 

What next, friends? The Annual Trapeze Artists' Convention? The League of Capuchin Monkey Handlers? YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE.

Rest assured, I will keep you posted.

T

stream of semi-consciousness

Wobbly travel drawing from commute

[The following is copied and pasted from a document I typed up while at the place of employment, in a state of giddy boredomus extremis. Not entirely sure if enough oxygen was getting through to my brain at the time, so consider yourself forewarned.)

Well! How are you? A good moving on to 2012 was had by all, I hope? Twenty twelve, folks. Do you remember how spaceshippy that sounded when we were teenagers? And yet, still no beaming-up! I don't know.

Here I am in Hotel Recession on the hinterlands of Dublin, teaching my class. They are working away busily and I am terribly, terribly bored. Every so often I circle the room, and lurk behind them, hoping for a answerable, not too challenging question to come my way. And it's only 11.16. We've already had our morning break. Hysterical shriek of disbelief! I can't get the internet on my laptop, AND my fancy Christmas present phone is banjaxed for reasons known only to itself, proving once more that technology is worse than useless when it breaks because it creates the expectation that yes! we are contactable at all times! Aren't we modern and fantastic? Except when NOT, and we feel silly and cheated. I have a crick in my neck - it's all creak-ouch-yikes and I feel sort of vaguely broken, because it's January and the other morning, I woke up and smelled the January air of loss. It's like there's a seasonal alarm clock in my cells, waiting for this time of of the year.

Sitting here, all abandoned by modern technology, a person's thoughts are apt to turn all random and profound. I've been thinking a bit about the parenting I received, and how it's affected me. I have been thinking  what it was to have an absent, workaholic father, half-suffocating, half-neglecting. Like DramaBoy. Not much like the JB, who is relatively sane and present, all things considered. I've been doing a lot of reading on mental health, (research for the show I am in) and it's hard not to point and say, ooh! Borderline Personality Disorder! Bi-polar disorder! That's my da! And it's suddenly clear to me that I have chosen to be loved by people who confirm my own bias about myself. And I have been trying to fix my relationship with my father through my romantic relationships. What did I think, that if I could make them love me, like I want them to, that I'll feel better, somehow?

I did think that. Or I acted as if I did, which is the same thing. Thank God for the JB. If I'd married Dramaboy, ooh. I dread to think.

In another hour and a bit, (ARG. THAT IS LONG) we'll all convene in the kitchen where we'll boil water in the white plastic kettles, one of which leaks and the other emits a ferocious smell of burning rubber, which can't be particularly good, can it? My co-teacher on this course says huddling in the kitchen for lunch with the 20 strong class makes her feel that she should leave so they can complain about her. But there is only half an hour in which to eat, (a terrible state of affairs!) so I stick it out.

So! Some resolutions, for the season that is in it:

• Draw every day, one a day.
  
• Make a cartoon every month.
• Get therapy.
• Go/keep running.
• Be bold. Don't get the willies. Or don't act on them, anyway. And then:
  
• Hope that it's true that fortune favours the bold.

How about you? Have you resolved?

Whatever your resolutions  might be, and wherever you find yourselves, I wish you all such a happy new year.

x
T

Season's greetings

I offer you this cartoon of mine in a spirit of bonhomie and festive cheer, and I wish you all tremendously good times, my friends, for the season and 2012.
xx

T

PS. Oooh! Star-spotting: Colm Me@ney was in the local pub last night, all apparently nice and dead normal. Irish people like to be all cool with stars in their midst. It's funny: No big deal, man! Hollywood, pfft. I choose not to be a celebrity, myself.

Seen anyone, recently? I know London and NYC are positively littered with stars. You're falling over them, aren't you?

on blogging

I don't know if I really am busy. I seem to spend a lot of time thinking how busy I am, if that's anything to go by. There are lots of worky things going on which I dare not mention, for fear of being revealed. Naturally enough, the more personal you are on your blog, the more important it becomes to hide your identity. And yet, what is a blog for, if not to have a safe place to vent? And having more than one seems fragmented and complicated.

Tricky, eh? I'd like to able to tell my whole story here. You're my friends, after all. All this dodging and diving, role-playing and image-projecting - pfffft.

What do you think? Do you limit what you write to one specific area of your life? I think sometimes it'd be nice to be able to be all open and out there, just write in my own name, no fear or favour. So what if my family cut me off!

Hrmm.

How much would you curl up and die if the wrong person read your blog?

 

*Thinks of a few people, curls up and dies.*


And now, a calming look at some trees:
 

report

Oh dear. I seem to have dropped the blogging ball, so to speak. I have left you with The Question for an age. (Thank you for your consoling answers. I am Not Taking It Personally. You know, the fact my beloved niece acted like I might stick her with a fork and toast her on the fire, and ran away from me, screaming. Hah! I forgot to report her charming question: You not my mummy. What are you?
Me: WHAT AM I? Just a child-toaster!
Not. Taking. It. Personally.)

It's back to school-ish, cover your books-ish weather here. Time for new shoes, and a new geometry set. Sharpen your pencils! Lay out your uniform! The air has had that delicious autumn chill (I like the Irish Winter. I readily accept that this makes me Odd.) the leaves are turning, there's that wonderfully gloomy smell of decay in the air, with all its intimation of mortality. Ah, yes! Mortality! Don't you just love it?

Ha.

So, yes. I have been busy with these and other preoccupations. I have been drawing a lot. I have been to lots of meetings, and been doing lots of planning. I made a cognitive leap or two.

And today we finally saw our social worker, the dear Detective, who handed over our report to read, and left the room - surely the closest I'll ever get to the red book moment in This is Your Life. Other people from my group have reported finding it tough to read their life story, but I just, for whatever reason, didn't. I mean, it's not like you don't know. None of my life events are a no-go area to me; I've taken the sting out of them by processing them here (And I thank you for reading. That's so important.) or in my work. I don't think anyone could accuse me of living a life unexamined - probably, like all of you too, of the online writing persuasion, I have had ample opportunity to think about My Stuff. We do that, don't we? And, it turns out, that is good for you. Like Guinness.

However. It is very interesting how much of a story resides in the manner of its telling. There are so many ways to spin a life; the details you select are so telling. My mother, the home-maker, the baker of cakes - well, all that is true. There's so much more, though. My mother, defender of the proper use of the apostrophe, arthritis sufferer, stalwart, stoic, charitable figure, nice person, repressed, passive, defensive person, with the sardonic sense of humour. You know? And the fact my father's rather florid temper becomes "a more old-fashioned parenting style". Dramaboy was characterised as "moody and dramatic". Also, to be fair, a massive over-simplication. So where is the truth, exactly?

All that said, our detective friend did a beautiful job for us, in distilling the reams of material to a coherent, credible account of us. A great relief. Now to wait a couple of weeks before the next Adoption Council meeting, where she will go before the board. She doesn't foresee any problems.

Progress, then! Good!

And now, for a picture. I find myself drawing and redrawing this view, it's endlessly interesting to me:

back soon

when things are less mental. (I can't wait.)
xx
T

 

MY LAWN

Things are like this:

• The rain, it raineth, in perpetuity.

• Two weeks remain before A Biggish Show In Which I'd Prefer Not to Embarrass Myself Unduly opens. My Smokey film is in it. However, the Smokey film is not exactly what you could call made and therefore frantically I am working on it, if by working on it you mean, hissing through gritted teeth at my computer screen "Thississshit, thisisshit."

• I haven't been Out much recently. I plan to take the bus to the library to hang a poster later, in the rain. A high point, if you will.

• Blah. I am bored of myself. It's not so much I am in a fit of self-loathing, not at all, it's just I've been me for so long, I'd like to be someone else for a bit. Someone normal, who has a proper job.

• I apologise in advance for going on All the Fecking Time about the cat. (But I am going to anyway. Sorry about that.) Being new to this, I didn't realise cats could be so funny. I thought they were just elegant and strangely satisfying to behold. Until we got adopted by P-kit, aka Honorblackman, I thought all they did was play charmingly with a ball of wool, stare at you with their inscrutable glass eyes, and be aloof. Not so, I can now inform you.
  
  For a black and white feline interloper set foot in the garden last weekend, on the lookout for adventure. And P-Kit, (I swear this is true), sat on the doorstep and howled menacingly at the newcomer:
  
  MY LAWN, she said. MY LAWN, MY LAWN. MY LAAAWN!
  
  It's more of a patch of grass, but that's pretty good for a cat, don't you think? Unfortunately I have no proof of the above, because if I did, I'd be Really Big on Touyube. I'd have a million hits, with my talking cat, (rubbing hands together, like a modern day Silas Marner). However, for your listening pleasure, and because it is more fun than doing my work, I asked the JB to reenact P-kit's statement. He has the gift:

  My_lawn

  
  Honestly, now. It was like that.
  T

voluntary

I apologise for the long silence. I had somesorta bizarro virus which reduced me to a bedridden shivering wreck for a night last week, and then, the next day, I had some disturbance in my vision, whereby a square section of my sight dropped out and went all pixelated and started pulsating sickeningly. And after that, I was afflicted by pins and needles in my hands, a numb thumb and, the ability to see dead people.* But after a bit of lying around watching the disco special light effects on my eyelids, I suddenly recovered and felt reborn and Full of Renewed Purpose. 
So, eh. If anything like that ever happened to you, let me know? Maybe we can start a support group, or something.

Life has been packed recently, I think you could say. On Saturday I met some friends I made doing some voluntary work about 10 years ago. A group of social eccentrics like me, they eschewed Friday nights in lively, warm Dublin pubs and clubs, to hand out sangwiches, soup and company to homeless people on the streets of the Dirty Oul Town. An oddly absorbing activity. Oh! the vomit-dodging adventures, the tragic stories, the cold realities, ambulances, the characters, the randomers in the back of my orange Beetle.

I am not really a group person, but it would be impossible not to be at ease with those people. It was that unicorn of things, a group with no hierarchy and no cliques. You'd come in after the work and everyone would be decompressing loudly after their week, buttering bread, throwing flasks around, stirring soup, complaining, slagging each other. It was a family. We'd pile into cars and split off around town, and though there we went into some dark, frankly dangerous places, the people on the street looked after us. We felt oddly invulnerable. Or naive, depending on your point of view.

One of us, a spark with the nervous energy of a caffeinated humming-bird, is now a project manager for a large Irish charitable organisation. He set up a camp for displaced people in Darfur. We aren't half proud of him and his mental brand of kindness. He'd answer his friends' texts pleading with him to join them in the pub with the immortal words: FUCK OFF, I'M SAVING THE WORLD. FUCK OFF, isn't that fantastic? He is an emphatic, capitalised kind of feller. Other catchphrases: I FEEL SO VIOLATED (in response to nearly anything). And: MAD IN THE HEAD, in response to anything else.
all pronouced in a paint-strippingly strong Donegal accent. (Think Liam Neeson's accent, but on steroids, if you are not familiar.)

And though there has been a sea change in the thinking about how homelessness is managed, about how giving people food on the streets is "enabling", I still like to believe we did did more good than harm. That's about all you can hope for, isn't it? If a real workable alternative existed, then yes, you could say we were helping them to choose to live on the streets. But when someone has nowhere else to go, then, what about that? A sandwich is at least a symbol that someone cares. Don't you think?

Here endeth the nostalgic interlude. Other news: there has been a deluge of biblical proportions today - a great big clatter of rain. Honorblackman is asleep on my desk, like this:


You would think she is exhausted, but that is not the case, believe me, unless sleeping 20 hours a day can tire a cat out. I would draw her doing something else, but she has taken laziness to the level of an artform, so there you are.

We completed the last of our interviews with the detective today. Hurray! We wait now while she compiles a 65 page report on us - (SIXTY-FIVE. About us. Poor, poor woman. I predict she'll lose the will to live around page 14.)

Also, today is the JB's birthday. He is 37, a fact we will celebrate later by ingesting large amounts of cream and sponge. And so it goes. Another year.


T

*Not really, about the dead people.